Google can do what?

So say you have done all the things that I have said in previous posts about your social networking. Now you getting job offers left and right. Next thing you have to do is the interview. When you go in there will be lots of questions asked to you. But hopefully you will have a chance to ask your own questions. If you aren't given this chance, that might be a bad sign. So what should you do before you go in? Well first off, research the company you are going into.

Do a quick Google search on the company and maybe the position in your company. Find anything other than some news article and the job posting itself? Didn't think so. But here is what you can do. First thing go into advanced search and search by file type, or place this command at the beginning of your search "filetype:(pdf, excel, doc, etc.)" This will limit your search to only the filetype of your choosing. Now what can you gain from this? Well if you search by PDF or even powerpoint, you can get presentations that the company has created. You search by excel docs and you might find payroll. Not exaggerating here. I know a guy who trains this kind of stuff for a living. He used to put in the names of companies that were in His classes to see what they could find. That was until He found the commissions of all the managers of the CEO that was in his class. Needless to say, very awkward.

So the question is how does Google have these things? Is this illegal? Is Google hacking our networks? Well to answer those questions with the following; Magic, maybe...., and no. Google "crawls" the internet. Much like you surf the net, Google does, but much much faster than you or I. What happens is that say you attach a document to an email. You send your email and somewhere between here and that Nigerian prince that is giving you millions to hold, there is a place that is not encrypted, and allows open access to their network that your email crossed over. Google by happen chance finds this area and starts caching and downloading the email and the attachment. Or the more simple situation, somebody saved this doc to something the outside world could reach, meaning Google could too.

Google isn't doing this to be evil, it is just how their service works. It has to find everything on the internet in order to index it and make searches faster. If they didn't do this, then search results would be meaningless and take forever to get anything that was even close to what you were asking for.

Once you have done your research, go into the interview with your questions and maybe even some insight that would make it look like you are very interested in the company. Trust me, if I were interviewing two people and they were similar. I'd pick the candidate that actually seem to know what it was in fact our company did. Don't be the guy just looking for a job, be the guy looking to fill a role.